Shooting and saving in RAW form

[chloew]

Amen on the 10D comment. I bought myself the little Canon S500 (Digital Elph) for those situations.

[CJ Max]

Your TIFF files (8-bit) are going to be 4-6x larger, on average, than your JPEG files. That's why they take longer to process. RAW capabilities weren't availble until the 828, if my memory serves me. I'm not sure if I detect some confusion on your part about what the differences among the various file types are. The following may help you out a wee bit.

When an image is captured as a RAW file by the camera, that is analogous to capturing an image on film. It still needs to be developed and printed. With a digital camera you've captured the image, but you won't be able to print it until it is processed (developed) properly. All RAW files must be processed. You cannot print directly out of a RAW file. Most processing is done in a proprietary software program supplied with the camera and downloaded on your computer. You may save your processed images as JPEG or TIFF files. JPEG files are compressed files or lossy files. Information is left out as the software compresses the RAW file. This makes for smaller sized files for storage purposes; however, it also creates artifacts - visible color aberations (defects) most often. You choose how much information you wish to loose by choosing the quality of the JPEG image, ie: q.4-12 with q.12 being the highest image quality (less loss). Most high quality images in JPEG are done in q.12. Some use q.10. For posting on a web site, most are "dumbed down" to a q.6 or so regardless of what higher quality number you used. TIFF 16-bit files are considered lossless. You will get your best image quality here. The downside is that it takes a lot of storage space, and if your hard drive space is limited, that's a pain. There is also a TIFF 8-bit file. There is compression in using a TIFF 8-bit file. I usually don't even pay any attention to this one as it doesn't print out as good an image as the TIFF 16-bit file does.

Just as an example: one of my TIFF 16-bit files is 19.7MB, while the same JPEG q.12 runs 3.6MB and a PBase photo 1.6MB. One can see quickly from this example why file storage can be an issue for some. As I work in TIFF 16-bit I really dislike to make a JPEG image, so my PBase images are just straight JPEG's with no retouching, cropping, etc.. One of these days when I get PS CS installed and my Intuos 3 tablet set up I'll put together something in a professional format there. Right now my retouching tools are less than optimal (I use an optical mouse), and I rely on my portfolio of 8"x10" prints to do my "selling".

Having said all that, because most of the images that I print are 8"x10", I routinely work out of TIFF 16-bit files. I have printed some images in JPEG q.12 and compared them to the ones done in TIFF 16-bit, and I can see small but noticeable differences in saturation, color gradations, shadows and highlights. When I showed them to others, they were all able to pick out the TIFF 16-bit image as "better" to "slightly better". On a 4"x6" print, it doesn't make much difference. If one has a lower quality printer, one may not see much difference either, even in the larger sizes. In this case you just need to try out both types of files.

My typical workflow looks like this: RAW file downloaded from camera to computer via FireWire connection and processed in Sigma Photo Pro (you will use your camera mfg's proprietary software here and not SPP, obviously), processed RAW file saved as a TIFF 16-bit file, artistic retouching (postprocessing) - if needed - done in Photoshop on the TIFF 16-bit file and saved as a TIFF 16-bit file. TIFF 16-bit file imported into Qimage where it is cropped and printed. Note that I don't crop and print out of Photoshop. Qimage does it easier and better.

I hope that this helps a wee bit and doesn't add to the confusion. Any questions, just ask.

Cliff.

[sbug_adam]

thanks a lot CJ.. that info is absolutely priceless!

Adam